"I love to tell the story..." I am paid to tell the story of NASA Science, but I feel most fully alive when I tell God's story. I believe that "threads of glory" from that larger Story weave their way through all the other stories we tell. My writing is a quest to discover those threads and expose them. I live in Waldorf, MD, with my wife Laurie (a United Methodist pastor), son Brady (10) and daughter Becca (8).

About Me

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Embracing Our Christmas Stains

I have been reading a book called Christmas is Not Your Birthday recently.One of the points that author Mike Slaughter makes is that we try so hard to sanitize Christmas.Every year, we engage in a futile quest to clean up and create the perfect Christmas.

As I was reflecting on this idea recently, I thought of the line below from a 1973 episode of Sanford and Son.It’s an exchange between “entrepreneur” (a.k.a., junk dealer) Fred Sanford (played by Redd Foxx), and his bible-thumping, purse-slinging sister-in-law, Esther Anderson (played by Lawanda Page) that takes place when she comes to bail Fred out of jail.[1]

Esther: Fred Sanford, I’m glad my sister didn’t live to see the stain you’ve bought on this family.

Fred: Esther, I didn’t put no stain on your family.Your family was stained when I met y’all... Every time a baby was born, they had that ugly stain on them.That’s right!That ugly stain!Even AJAX couldn’t do nothing for it.

It struck me that Fred’s sentiment, while somewhat irreverent, could be describing our annual preparations for Christmas.This time of year we get out our “AJAX” (whether literal or figurative) and “scrub and scrub” and try to get everything looking pristine and perfect for Christmas.But no matter how hard we try, we can’t attain the perfection we seek.By the end of the season we are exhausted in every way.

We even do this in our churches.Nativity scenes are ubiquitous this time of year.They seek to create the perfect Kodak moment at the end of the Christmas pageant.We “clean up” the Christmas story and present a perfect image of Christmas.All of the characters are neatly arranged around the manger.Everyone is well-groomed and smiling.But the fact is, if you study the details of the actual stories (contained in the first two chapters of Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels) you realize the Christmas story is a whole lot more grittier, messier and complex than what we present on stage on Christmas Eve—it sounds much more like real life.

The fact is, we can “scrub and scrub”, but we can never get all the stains out of the real Christmas story—nor, I would argue, should we.

It’s been said: The perfect is the enemy of the good; I think it’s true.If we get caught up in trying to make something perfect we might very well miss out on something that has the potential to be good.For example, we can become consumed with trying to have a perfect Christmas and fail to appreciate what is so good about the Christmas story.If we try too hard to scrub Christmas clean, we might end up scrubbing Christ out of the holiday that bears his name.

What if the whole point God is trying to make in having the Christmas Story unfold precisely the way it did is that things don’t have to be perfect for them to turn out very good?What if the presence of a few stains in our lives or our dwelling places doesn’t bother God nearly as much as they bother us?

There is an old hymn called There is a Fountain Filled With Blood whose chorus says: “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains”.This line of theological thinking maintains Jesus’ blood does what no amount of our own scrubbing can do.Because of what Jesus did on the cross—and only because of that—we are now cleansed of our stains and made perfect before God.

But I’m not sure I believe that exactly.I’ve been a follower of Christ my whole life (41 years) and there are some stains that are just as stubborn as ever!I think perhaps reality is actually closer to Fred Sanford’s “theology”: “You can scrub and scrub but even AJAX won’t get rid of those stains.”That is to say, I think maybe we’re meant to keep some of our stains for eternity. (If that sounds strange, consider that Jesus, after the resurrection, still bore the marks of the nails that held him to the cross.Why weren’t those wounds healed?)

What if the blood of Jesus doesn’t remove our guilty stains altogether, but rather redeems them?What if the real Christmas story—not the sanitized nativity scene version—is meant to remind us that stains are an inescapable part of life on Earth—and that’s actually a good thing. What if stains are actually the flipside of giftedness[2]?What if the only way we can become all that God created us to be is to fully accept and embrace our stains?

No, you and I aren’t perfect people, and we never will be; but the good news we celebrate at Christmas is that by God’s grace, we are good people!We are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of our Creator and there is much good God can accomplish through us if we will simply follow Mary’s example and say, “Yes,” to God’s initiative in our lives.If we open ourselves, God can use us—stains and all—to “birth” our own unique Christmas miracle just like he did with Mary.